Column

Halifax Matters

Tristan Cleveland is an urban planner who has also worked in Montreal, Guyana and Venezuela. Cleveland grew up in the south shore of Nova Scotia and has been an advocate for sustainable planning in Halifax since 2012.

Whatever happened to the old Mike Duffy? So long, senator.

A senator playing fast and loose with parliamentary rules of residence, claiming as his full-time home a modest bungalow of a summer cottage that hasn’t seen a snowplow in a year’s worth of winters.

A senator pocketing more than $30,000 for the inconvenience of residing in rustic, rural Cavendish, P.E.I., 1,333 kilometres (as the Google crow flies) from his Senate workplace at 111 Wellington St. in Ottawa — while actually bedding down in a comfortable Ottawa suburb.

Not to forget the spectacle of a senator — having been caught with his fingers in the fudging and futzing jar — applying for a fast-tracked Prince Edward Island health card to make wrong appear right.

The former Mike Duffy would have been in his element.

One has to — almost — feel sorry for the old New Mike Duffy, now being brought low by all those new Old Mike Duffys.

Young Mike Duffy launched his career in the mid-1960s as a DJ — the Round Mound of Sound — at Amherst radio station CKDH. After discovering his nose for news, Duffy moved on to then-Halifax station CHNS where his gleefully non-partisan, neither-fear-nor-favour scoops from city hall and the provincial legislature earned him an enviable reportorial reputation, which earned him a position in CBC’s parliamentary bureau, which earned him his own star billing at CTV, which ...

Well, that’s where things soured.

Duffy began to believe his own publicity hype — and in his own self-worth. He lobbied for his Senate appointment and, when he landed it in 2008, assumed himself entitled to his entitlements. Including $900 a month to live part of the year in Ottawa where, of course, he has lived virtually all of the years since the 1970s.

New Mike Duffy, of course, is less than amused by his latest turn of misfortune, chiding reporters after a speech in Halifax last week to do some “adult” work instead of bothering him with trivial matters about where he lives and how much he claims for not living there.

Sorry, Mike. Those who live by the microphone sometimes get hit on the head with it on their way out the door.